MyBook II users: the process outlined below will not work for a MyBook II series device. Not only did this one support the 924 (does Oxford name all its chips after Porsches?) but it also had an accompanying user manual, not that I'm into that sort of thing.Īnyway, with no further ado, here's how to recover your MyBook from a Western Digital firmware 'Update' failure. The next day I took a different tack and got stuck into looking for a more recent version of the updater, finally digging one up at Dat Optic. Frustratingly the most recent chip that it supported was the 922, and I wasted the rest of the day trying to munge the libraries from Western Digital's 1.08a Firmware Eraser into Oxford's ye olde firmware updater in the hope that I could get the MyBook to be recognised, but to no avail.

Oxford don't seem to be big on releasing anything to the general public, but after a while I found an Oxford firmware updater at the FireWire Depot. You can't flash a firmware without flashing software, so I went in search of anything related to Oxford controllers. Google also revealed that the controller in the MyBook was an Oxford Semiconductor OXUF924DSb, further hmmmmmGlavin! boffin info here. As the MyBook was now a shiny paper-weight and I had no desire to return the device with my data on it, I took to it with a screwdriver, and then took it apart (I have more recently discovered that there are a couple of guides to doing this - 320Gb Premium Edition, 500Gb Essential Edition) but disassembly is not difficult anyway.Īfter removing the drive and backing up my data, I examined the MyBook's circuitry and found that the flash memory was a SST39LF200A, which is a Silicon Storage Technology128K x16 CMOS Flash (more reading here). As all those in a similar position know, this situation is something of a catch-22 the MyBook cannot be returned as it still has sensitive data on it, and opening it will void the warranty.

If you're in the same boat and desperate to get to the instructions on how to recover your MyBook, click here.Ī quick search showed many others in the same situation as myself, but with no solution to restore the MyBook to a fully working state.

Half way through the updating process, directly after erasing the firmware on the MyBook, the updater encountered an error leaving me with a completely unusable drive. I recently suffered the same fate as many others when attempting to upgrade my Western Digital MyBook Pro external drive to the latest firmware revision, 1.08a.

My book wd for mac replacing parts